Janet Daley was born in America where she began her political life on the Left as an undergraduate at Berkeley. She moved to Britain (and to the Right) in 1965 where she spent nearly twenty years in academic life before becoming a political commentator: all factors that inform her writing on British and American policy and politicians.

New world order: everybody gets treated like a criminal

Can you see the pattern yet? In Cyprus, everybody with a bank account is going to have a portion of his savings confiscated by the government (or maybe not, if they have a small enough amount of money in the bank to be officially excused from the cull). This fit of kleptocracy is supposed to be justified by the large numbers of Russian money launderers and currency smugglers who are known to be using Cypriot banks as a haven for their illicit cash.

So what if you are a blameless resident of that island who happens to have your life savings in a national bank? Or an expat Brit who thought that the country with its sunny weather and low cost of living might be a welcome retirement option – and so parked your pension income in what you assumed to be a safe local spot? Tough. As far as the EU and the Cyprus government are concerned, you are indistinguishable from the rich corrupt Russians who seem to be – for some odd reason – unidentifiable in any way that would make them eligible for legitimate prosecution. The idea that they – the Russian criminals – might be traced, and duly stung for the sort of proportionate contribution that would make this shocking, across-the-board seizure of private capital unnecessary doesn't seem to have occurred to anybody. Even though much of this Russian cash is almost certainly from corrupt or illegal sources, nobody seems to want to bother to pursue the criminals and confiscate the proceeds of their crimes. Presumably that's too slow and complex a process. So much simpler just to penalise everybody.

Oddly enough, there is a parallel here with the abominable attempt to criminalise free speech in our new dog's dinner of a press law (sorry, Royal Charter). The Leveson inquiry was prompted by a scandal over phone hacking which is a straightforward criminal offence already punishable under existing law. But instead of simply pursuing and indicting the individuals who committed the offences (as is belatedly occurring now), the entire news industry is being subjected to repressive controls which implicitly treat all journalism as a form of potential criminality.

Instead of enforcing existing laws, we create a new one which hinders the actions of those who have no record of committing any offence. Instead of identifying and seizing the profits of international currency syndicates who store their cash in private banks, we just whack everybody who happens to have an honest savings account. You can expect to see a lot more of this hasty, indiscriminate pursuit of the law-abiding: for a sloppy, ineffectual political class, it can be a very convenient solution to a whole panoply of complex problems.